Musings
Thoughts on life, money, the web, and Wordpress!
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Why use WordPress?
Why use WordPress? We believe WordPress is one of the most powerful, flexible and supported content management platforms for building personal, church, and business websites…And we are not alone! We are excited to report that WordPress has grown this year to power 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%, and the latest data show 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.
WordPress is not just for blogging anymore. Best of all, WordPress is FREE!..And you can choose from thousands of FREE plugins and FREE themes to have a professional web presence in a very short amount of time.
Resisting the urge to use Google Adwords
With our last Internet venture, we used Google Adwords to get traffic and grow our business. Of course when we started in 2003, Adwords was a fairly new concept. In those days you could advertise a keyword for $0.05 and get 20 qualified leads for a dollar. These days 20 qualified leads can cost $20 or more.
We were spending over $200,000 a year with Google Adwords. That traffic was our bread and butter. The problem was I got lazy and left way too much traffic…free traffic on the table. This time…as we build FamilyCow.com, we are working to build it on a shoestring and resist the urge to dump 10% of our revenues into Google’s pockets. Not because we don’t think you can still build a business with pay-per-click advertising but because we want a challenge to sharpen our web skills.
The traffic I’m talking about is called organic traffic. It comes from having properly optimized website with attention to good SEO practices and getting listed in directories and indexed in the major search engines. It comes from having remarkable content that others link to and share with their friends.
Today someone challenged me to master the art of word of mouth advertising. To become the WordPress hosting company that people can’t wait to tell others about. I accept the challenge!
Growing a WordPress Website – Bringing It To Life!
A good blog or any site for that matter should have quality content that makes the site worth visiting. I hate websites that waste my time telling me nothing but use my visit to attract advertisers. We want FamilyCow.com to be one of those treasured sites that you can’t imagine what life would have been like if you hadn’t found us and that you can’t wait to refer to a friend to. To make our site irresistible, we need to start with usable and relevant content.
Important: I believe that for most of us to be successful online, we need to focus on a niche. The more specialized the better. A niche store may not be sustainable on main street because of the lack of prospects…but on the web, niches thrive. Our niche is WordPress.
Tom and I have been working together coding things in one form or another for 20+ years. I tend to be more the visionary and Tom is an amazing tech guy. I honestly can’t think of something I’ve asked to happen on a site that he didn’t make happen. In our writing, I focus on the revenue and growth side of growing a WordPress websites and Tom focuses on the technical side of setting up the site, plugin & theme reviews, and tips & tricks.
We have WordPress installed. We have chosen a simple and sustainable WordPress theme. We are choosing the plugins for our website that will help us customize WordPress for what we need it to do. We have started adding content and we each have a focus to write about. Now we need to focus on traffic.
We are starting from zero traffic and a brand new blog. I plan to post on what we are doing promote the site and the follow what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully we will all learn something together.
Growing a WordPress Website – Our Business Idea
So what’s it take to grow a WordPress website? I guess that’s something we are going to find out together over the next couple of months.
FamilyCow.com is a domain we purchased from a friendly competitor of our first web business. Our main interest in the site was that it had already been well indexed in the engines. The site has been around since 1999. I had heard that Google looked favorably upon longevity so we thought it would be good for linking to our site an what not. When we sold our web business, we kept familycow.com…because we liked the name and felt it would be usable in the future.
After a few months of “retirement” from the web..we were brainstorming one day with our techy friend, Tom and started talking about all that we had learned over eight years of running an e commerce website and that we would love to be able to help others do what we had done. After a few weeks of tossing ideas around we decided to turn FamilyCow.com into a blog promoting WordPress hosting and related services. As we work to duplicate our success online, we share our story with others and hopefully learn a few things along the way.
See we’re the guys people come up to in social settings and say…”boy I’d love to have a website…can you help?” Officially, now we can point them to FamilyCow.com and say just sign up for the hosting for $9.95/mo and tell us what domain name you want and we’ll take care of setting it up for you along with an email address…you just add content. We’ll even include the domain costs and set-up in the $9.95/mo.
Over the years we’ve learned that the hardest part of getting and staying online is the assumption that everyone will figure out the techie stuff. The reality is after a couple of weeks of wrestling with crashed sites, screwed up themes, out dated plugins and improperly configured email…people lose interest. So we want to provide a solution where someone can start immediately with the “easily doable” stuff like adding content and bypass all the the “pull-out-your-hair” stuff.
So we have a business plan and the skills to back it up. We have a great domain name and we obviously know WordPress is the best software to build our website/blog with. Now what?
Why You Need To Have A Web Presence
Why do you need to have a web presence? Because everybody’s doing it – that’s why.
I know that is not a good reason for doing anything, but let me explain.
Just a few short years ago most people would have checked the local newspaper for upcoming movies or events in their area and if they needed a plumber or electrician they would have just looked in the yellow pages. That trend is changing. The next time you are watching TV, watch the commercials, the news or even your favorite shows, many if not all of them now promote their websites, social media accounts and e-mail addresses. When your out at the mall shopping or out for dinner, take a good look at the people around you. Many of them have their cell phones, ipads, laptops and other mobile devices with them and most of them are connected to the internet.
You see, because so many people are now online and have some means of access to the internet whenever they need it, it is becoming the norm for consumers to seek out the information they are after on the internet first. This is a trend that is not likely to phase out any time soon, but will continue to grow. Businesses and organizations have realized this and are finding creative ways to utilize the internet to get information into the hands of their potential customers or members of their organizations.
The beauty of the internet is that it offers more then any other media outlet to reach potential customers or members and can include, print, video, sound, pictures and more with complete interactivity for those visiting your website. Your web presence can be custom tailored to meet the needs of you, your business or organization. It can be used as a way for you to get information directly to those who can benefit most from it.
You may be thinking to yourself at this point:
- How can a web presence help my business?
- How can a web presence help my organization?
- I don’t have a business so why do I need a web presence?
Over the next few days I will be answering these questions as well as showing practical ideas and suggestions of how a web presence can be of great benefit to you, your business or organization.